It’s a rare example of English being simpler than other languages, so I’m curious if it’s hard for a new speaker to keep the nouns straight without the extra clues.
I’m a Finnish speaker. Nouns aren’t gendered in Finnish either, so that’s not weird.
Things that do trip me up:
- Pronouns (lack of T/V distinction (i.e. just one “you”) and gendered third person)
- Articles (Finnish doesn’t have articles as such, so adding them sometimes takes some brainpower)
- so freaking many irregular verbs etc
- seriously what is this orthography even (Finnish grammar may be complex, but the same can’t be said of the pronunciation)
Actually, I’m learning French right now and gendered nouns aren’t even that much of a problem. I was dreading the numerals more.
We actually do have a second person singular, “thou.” We just transitioned out of using it because ‘politeness’. Thou could useth the second person singular, but thou would soundeth quite archaic. (Think I conjugated that correctly.) You can still see it used in some religious texts in reference to God.
I believe it’d be thou wouldst sound archaic or thou soundest [most] archaic, in early modern English depending on the tense, but that’s a great point.
I think you’re right. I didn’t think the “helper words” in the conditional should get conjugated, but I grabbed a Book of Common Prayer off the shelf and there’s a bunch of “thou shalt” + infinitive, so evidently the conditional does get conjugated (in addition to “thou didst” and “thou hast”.) Pretty sure I noticed some 2nd person weak verbs that looked like they had the same conjugation as the 3rd person (eg “Remember thou keep holy …”) I did note “he cometh”, so maybe that -eth ending is actually an older conjugation for the 3rd person that later morphed into an -s ending? Just noticed “he saith (says)”, and the confirmed -eth ending on a bunch of 3rd person congregations. Interestingly, I found a LOT of “thou shalt”, some “thou wilt”, but no “thou couldst” or “thou wouldst”. Probably because the BCP is all like, “you WILL, this is not an option, sinner.”
I don’t know though! I’m a typical English first language speaker and I’m just going with what feels right and using my understanding of grammar from my French education.
It does get confusing! I’m kind of a Shakespeare nerd, and the cult I was in till I was a young adult was big on the King James Version of the bible, so I guess I’ve just had a lot of exposure. I don’t really know the rules.
Wait does Finnish not have gendered third person pronouns?
English may not have gendered nouns, but it has plenty of other challenges.
Not confusing at all, Spanish and English are very flexible languages
As someone trying to learn Spanish I wish there was no gendering in Spanish. It makes the language significantly harder to learn.
not at all. it simplifies the learning experience by quite a bunch.
one of the more confusing is learning other gendered languages where the gender of some object is different to the one in your mother tongue
one of the more confusing is learning other gendered languages where the gender of some object is different to the one in your mother tongue
That’s something I hadn’t really considered. Interesting!
To make matters worse, some languages have the exact same word but with a different gender. Heat in Spanish is el calor but in Catalán is la calor
To make matters even worse, in some languages the exact same word with different gender has different meaning.
In German:
“der Band”, male, = a (book) volume
“das Band”, neutral, = ribbon
“die Band”, female = (music) bandBonus: “die Bande” can be a gang, a sports barrier, and (relationship) ties.
It’s sure nice not having to learn German. I’m a native.
Yeah I basically never thought about the gender of English nouns because there’s very few reasons to
Try Finnish or Hungarian, even their pronouns are genderless.
OK, but ugro-finnic languages are incredibly harder compared to English, I would say even much harder than German (saying this as a basic Estonian speaker - which is similar to Finnish from what I can tell).
Technically English is my third languge, but also simultaneously my most fluent.
In short, not confusing at all. Because in Chinese (any variation of Chinese) nouns are also not gendered.
Pronouns in Chinese are also not gendered
He = 他 (tā)
She = 他 (tā)
No confusion with pronouns either. My parents constantly say he when refering to a woman, or she when refering to a man, or mix them up while talking about the same person in the same conversation. No me tho, I never get confused. I learned English at like grade 2-3.
What? She in Chinese is 她. It might not be used often but it definitely is gendered…
Nope. 她 isn’t really used. 他 is the pronoun, even if its refering to women.
Like if you wrote 他 to refer to a woman in an essay on a test, it’d get marked as correct.
Edit: Although, on the internet, people commonly type “TA” instead of “他”.
Edit 2: So clarification
他 refers to both men and women
她 can only be used to refer to women, and this is rarely used, except maybe in english class to teach about the english pronouns
它 refers to non humans, like animals or objects
all 3 are pronounce the same exact way (tā)
hmm, idk man, over here 他 is only for men, and 她 is only for women.
though in speaking we just use 佢 because canto
Easy, no problems at all. English articles are what breaks my head.
Wow, really? “A, an, and the”? I’m curious how you get confused with those.
…because its the articles which are not gendered, not the nouns.
As the speaker of an English language me can tell you is not a difficult.
Because recognising when to use “a”, “the”, or 0 article is tricky.
A/an is usually fine. 0 article and the are tricky, and then getting it right on the fly is hard.
We take it all for granted and get it, but they’re hard for people who don’t have an equivalent in their first language.
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Mandarin truly has the best grammar. There are a few weird things, but in general it’s very simple and elegant.
Eh, gendered nouns are just an old holdover. At least English (usually) uses words to improve specificity. For example, “Pick up my medicine” as opposed to “pick up medicine.” It seems redundant to some until suddenly you need to specify after the fact.
The more precise the language the fewer chances of miscommunication. A perfect language would be precise and unambiguous without deliberate effort (as opposed to laziness, slang, shorthand, etc.) which is probably completely impossible to craft, much less about.
I disagree that being perfectly unambiguous is a feature of a “perfect” language.
Ambiguity creates holes for us to fill, and some people don’t realize how good it feels to fill those holes.
Out of German and English, I always found German to be better suited for factual texts (scientific papers and essays, news textbooks, encyclopedias etc.) because it’s less ambiguous and English for more creative writing (novels, poems, opinion pieces, speeches etc.) because there is more scope for the imagination and the ambiguity leaves more room for double entendres, puns and other fun stuff. There are advantages to both.
If you want to be more confused, you should know that some languages have gendered verbs.
Not at all, it’s easier that other gendered languages since object genders get shuffled up.
Not.
English is a very straigh forward to learn language.
Now, an English native speaker learning a gender declining language… oh, how fun to watch.
I find it fairly easy to learn but insanely difficult to master
Most of us who are native English speakers haven’t mastered it either, so you’re not alone
I speak my native language for a couple of decades now and the more I speak it, the more I realize I don’t master it.
I can read, write and hold a conversation in English. But if asked, I will say I can get by but very far from even the lowest level of mastery.
It’s not confusing at all, except in the very specific case of nouns referring to people or animals that don’t have gendered variants.
For example, in my language, the word corresponding to “(a) sheep” has a masculine and feminine form, with the feminine used neutrally. Consequently, when seeing “sheep” in English, I assume the feminine and seeing it used with “he” is a bit of cognitive dissonance.
Similarly, most words for human professions are by default masculine.
I remember reading a story written in English, and it kept mentioning „the cook“ (no pronoun, no name). My gender biased brain assumed the cook must be male. So I got confused when the pronoun „she“ finally appeared. I had to reread the paragraph to understand what was going on.
Embarrassing and eye opening.Ive spent some times on farms and haven’t ever herd/used he for a singular male sheep before.
If its a singular male I would say the ram.
But its just normally sheep, generally female. If you want to be specific its weathers, ewes, lambs or rams.
It was a bit confusing at first but I got used to it quickly, it’s much simpler this way
